The best towns you can reach by train within an hour of Trento

Caldes

Why visit Caldes

The commune sits at around 700 metres in the lower valley, along the river, thirty-five kilometres northwest of Trento and below the southern ridge of the Brenta Dolomites. It is a scattered municipality of six hamlets: the village itself, Samoclevo, San Giacomo, Cassana, Tozzaga, Bordiana and Bozzana, strung along the slope between 635 and 767 metres, each holding its own cluster of stone houses on the same grade above the river.

The castle at the centre of the arrangement was built between 1230 and 1235 by Rambaldo and Arnoldo da Cagnò as a five-storey tower-house, controlling commercial traffic up the valley together with the higher fortification above Samoclevo. It passed to a noble family in 1464, who rebuilt it into the form it holds now, and it belongs today to the autonomous province of Trento as a museum venue.

What emerges is a settlement pattern of small hamlets set at deliberate intervals along a single slope, held together historically by one river route and one controlling tower, and preserved since as a recognized example of that rural arrangement.

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What to see in Caldes

• Castel Caldes. Five-storey tower-house begun in 1230 and rebuilt by the Thun family from 1464, with sixteenth-century painted rooms and coats of arms, now a Buonconsiglio museum venue.
• Borgo di Caldes. Stone-built historic centre below the castle, member of I Borghi più belli d'Italia for the preservation of its rural architecture and lanes.
• Samoclevo. Upper hamlet at 767 metres above Caldes, paired in the medieval period with the Rocca di Samoclevo to control traffic on the Val di Sole road.

How to get to Caldes

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Trento is roughly 53 minutes away by road.

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Costermano sul Garda

Why visit Costermano sul Garda

The commune sits on a moraine amphitheater twenty-five kilometers northwest of Verona. The hills were a feud of the Brescia monastery of Santa Giulia in the early Middle Ages, then passed through Scaliger and Venetian rule before joining Italy in 1866; the name sul Garda was added only in 2018, to anchor the town's tourism identity to the water it sits above rather than on.

That distinction matters here: this is not a lakefront village but a hill settlement looking down at the shore, its center, its cemetery hill, and its vineyard slopes arranged around the belvedere at Marciaga rather than around a harbor. The economy runs on olive oil and hillside vines, and on the holiday accommodation that has filled these slopes since the 1970s, but the single largest reason people come here is not agricultural.

The cemetery holds the dead of a war fought decades after the monastery's feud and centuries after the Scaliger lords, and it sits on the same morainal hill as the sanctuary, the parish church, and the vine rows, a place where the working landscape and the memorial landscape occupy the same short walk rather than separate zones.

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What to see in Costermano sul Garda

• Santuario della Madonna del Castello. Sanctuary on the spur of Marciaga, its fifteenth-century frescoes intact, with a terrace looking over Lake Garda and the eastern shore.
• Deutsche Soldatenfriedhof. The graves cover the hillside above the lake, laid out since 1967 for the dead of the Second World War, a place kept in silence rather than commentary.
• Chiesa di San Siro. Parish church rebuilt in the nineteenth century in the center of the village, its freestanding campanile visible from the surrounding slopes, with a sightline to Monte Baldo across the water.

How to get to Costermano sul Garda

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Verona is roughly 34 minutes away by road.

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Bardolino

Why visit Bardolino

Bardolino sits on the eastern shore of Lake Garda at 65 meters, twenty-five kilometers northwest of Verona. The hills behind town have been planted with vines since the Roman period, and the modern DOC was granted in 1968.

Three grapes do the work: Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. Long maceration produces Bardolino, the light red the town has lived on since the nineteenth century; short skin contact produces Chiaretto, the rosé that has overtaken the red in current sales.

Two churches hold the medieval line. San Zeno in the centro storico is ninth-century, one of the oldest in the province of Verona.

San Severo, built between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on the foundations of an earlier church mentioned in an 893 charter of Berengario, is the town's Romanesque anchor. The lakefront has been a tourist promenade since the 1950s.

The Palio del Chiaretto runs the first weekend of June; the Festa dell'Uva e del Vino runs the first week of October.

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What to see in Bardolino

• Chiesa di San Severo. Romanesque church built between the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on the foundations of a structure mentioned in a 893 charter.
• Chiesa di San Zeno. Ninth-century church in the centro storico, one of the oldest in the province of Verona, on a Latin cross plan with a small apse.
• Centro storico. Walled medieval core around Piazza Matteotti, with arcaded streets dating to the Venetian period from the fifteenth century.

How to get to Bardolino

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Verona is roughly 36 minutes away by road.

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Borgo Valsugana

Why visit Borgo Valsugana

Borgo Valsugana sits at 380 metres on the Brenta, thirty kilometres east of Trento, in the lower part of the Valsugana valley that carries the road and the railway between Trento and the Veneto plain. The Roman settlement of Ausugum stood on the same site, on the Claudia Augusta Altinate road from Altino to Tridentum, which set the town on a route between the plain and the mountains long before the present centre took shape.

The centro storico straddles the Brenta, arcades opening onto the quays on each bank, which is why locals and visitor guides call it the Little Venice of Trentino. The castle above the town looks down on this river centre, and the side valley to the west holds the art project among the meadows, so the town reads in three layers: the water level where the old houses face each other across the river, the height of the watchtower on the hill, and the separate, quieter valley given over to the works in natural materials.

The valley was the front line in 1915 to 1916 and much of the historic centre was rebuilt after the war, so the painted facades standing over the water today are largely a twentieth-century reconstruction of a much older river town.

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What to see in Borgo Valsugana

• Castel Telvana. Twelfth-century castle on Mount Ciolino above the town, built around a square watchtower five metres per side and twenty-six metres high.
• Ponte Veneziano. Fifteenth-century bridge over the Brenta crowned by two aedicules with graffiti inspired by seventeenth-century works of Jacopo Fiorentini.
• Arte Sella. Open-air contemporary art project in the Val di Sella since 1986, with works in natural materials around Malga Costa, including the Cattedrale Vegetale.

How to get to Borgo Valsugana

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Trento is roughly 49 minutes away by road.

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Levico Terme

Why visit Levico Terme

Levico Terme sits at 520 metres in the Valsugana, twenty kilometres east of Trento, between the Lagorai chain and the high plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone. The settlement passed under Habsburg jurisdiction in 1779 and was elevated to city rank in 1894 by decree of Franz Joseph I.

The spa quarter, the park and the lake sit close together at the edge of the old centre, with the fort watching all three from the hill above. The historic centre, with its imperial-era villas and the parish church of Santissimo Redentore, grew up around the spa rather than the other way round: the streets follow the shape of a resort built in the space of a few decades under Austro-Hungarian rule, rather than a town that predates it.

What survives is a place whose entire layout, from park gate to lakeshore to the fort on the ridge, still reads as the imperial spa it was built to be.

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What to see in Levico Terme

• Parco delle Terme. Grounds laid out by Georg Ziehl around the spa buildings and the hotel, with paths shaded by mature planting where the Christmas market sets up each winter.
• Grand Hotel Imperial. Art Nouveau facade facing the park it anchors, the rooms where Empress Elisabeth stayed still forming the core of the working hotel.
• Terme di Levico. The spa buildings that gave the town its purpose, drawing on water piped down from the mountain springs and still run as a treatment centre today.

How to get to Levico Terme

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Trento is roughly 30 minutes away by road.

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Rovereto

Why visit Rovereto

Rovereto sits at 204 metres in the Vallagarina, halfway between Trento and Verona on the Adige plain. The castle rises above the Leno torrent at the southern edge of the centre, built by the Castelbarco, expanded into a four-bastioned fortress by the Venetians from 1416, and handed to the Habsburgs in 1509 after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello.

That handover is the hinge of the town's layout: the porticoed streets of the centro storico still carry Venetian facades alongside Habsburg ones, running from Piazza Rosmini to the castle walls, with the Borgo Sacco quarter and the old silk-trade palazzi marking where the town's merchant wealth once sat. Above the centre, on the hill of Miravalle, the war made its own monument, cast from the bronze of cannons gathered from both sides of a conflict that had run through these mountains.

Depero, who lived and worked in Rovereto, gave the town a second, later claim, and the museum built around his work in 2002 sits inside a domed building at the opposite end of the town's story from the castle: one structure built for defence and passed between powers, the other built for a single collection and opened once, in peacetime. Between the fortress, the bell, and the museum, the town reads as a place shaped twice by the same war, first as ground fought over, later as ground that chose to remember it.

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What to see in Rovereto

• Castello di Rovereto. Rises above the Leno torrent at the southern edge of the centre, four bastions facing the town, the line where Venetian masonry gives way to the additions made after the handover to Austria.
• MART. The circular building by Mario Botta centres on a glass-and-steel dome over the entrance plaza. Inside, the permanent collection runs from Depero through Morandi, de Chirico and Carrà.
• Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Inside the castle, the collection of uniforms, trench artefacts, prints and personal testimonies tells the war from the Italian-Austrian front, the fighting that ran through the mountains around the town.

How to get to Rovereto

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Trento is roughly 31 minutes away by road.

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Meran

Why visit Meran

Merano sits at 324 metres in the basin where the Passer river meets the Adige, at the entrance to the Passeier and Vinschgau valleys, with mountains rising to 3,335 metres around it. The town was the capital of the County of Tyrol from the thirteenth century until 1420, when the Habsburgs moved the residence to Innsbruck.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria began wintering here in 1870 for the climate and the mild basin air; her stays turned Merano into a late-Habsburg spa destination, drawing Kafka, Rilke and Richard Strauss. The Kurhaus, an Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, and Castel Trauttmansdorff, where Sissi stayed and which now holds twelve hectares of botanical gardens and the Touriseum, anchor the imperial layer of the city.

Merano was annexed to Italy in 1919 under the Treaty of Saint-Germain. The bilingual city today is the centre of South Tyrolean wine and apple farming, host of the Merano WineFestival each November at the Kurhaus.

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What to see in Meran

• Giardini di Castel Trauttmansdorff. Twelve hectares of botanical gardens around the castle where Empress Elisabeth wintered, with eighty landscapes over a hundred-metre slope and the Touriseum tourism museum.
• Kurhaus. Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, the spa-town centrepiece of nineteenth-century Merano and venue of the Merano WineFestival each November.
• Passeggiata Lungo Passirio. Spa promenade along the Passer river through the centre of the city, lined with palms, flowers and the Wandelhalle, the covered Art Nouveau walking gallery.

How to get to Meran

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 29 minutes away by road.

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Trento

Why visit Trento

Trento sits at 194 metres on the Adige, the city Italy chose as the seat of one of its two northern autonomous provinces and the regional capital of Trentino-Alto Adige. Monte Bondone rises to two thousand metres directly above the western edge; the Brenta Dolomites are an hour west.

Between 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent met here in twenty-five sessions across the Duomo di San Vigilio and the Castello del Buonconsiglio, formulating the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation and shaping the next four centuries of European Christianity. The Duomo, begun in 1212 on the foundations of a late-Roman basilica, still stands at the centre of Piazza Duomo.

The Buonconsiglio, built 1239 to 1255 as the residence of the prince-bishops, is now the city's main museum. In 2013 Renzo Piano completed MUSE, the natural science museum on the south edge of town, with a six-storey jagged roofline that imitates the Dolomites.

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What to see in Trento

• Castello del Buonconsiglio. Thirteenth-century residence of the prince-bishops of Trento, host to sessions of the Council of Trent and now the city's main museum, with Gothic frescoes in the Torre Aquila.
• Duomo di San Vigilio. Romanesque-Gothic cathedral begun in 1212 on the remains of a late-Roman basilica, where most public sessions of the Council of Trent were held between 1545 and 1563.
• MUSE. Museum of natural science by Renzo Piano, opened 2013, with a 130-metre roofline that rises and falls in imitation of the Dolomites visible to the east.

How to get to Trento

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Trento is roughly 4 minutes away by road.

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